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Because his writing and spelling skills were sub-standard.
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With the escalation of the Vietnam War, The test standards were lowered.
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Which meant he was now eligible for the draft and induction into the U.S. Army.
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“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” he had explained two years earlier. “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”
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Where his appeal to be reclassified as a Muslim minister was denied 4–0 by the federal judicial district on February 20.
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As expected, Ali refused three times to step forward at the call of his name. An officer warned him he was committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000.
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As a result, on that same day, the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and the World Boxing Association stripped him of his title.
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“It is in the light of my consciousness as a Muslim minister and my own personal convictions that I take my stand in rejecting the call to be inducted. … I find I cannot be true to my beliefs in my religion by accepting such a call. I am dependent upon Allah as the final judge of those actions brought about by my own conscience.”
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Other boxing commissions followed suit. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on May 8 and convicted in Houston on June 20 of the criminal offence of violating the Selective Service laws by refusing to be drafted.
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The trial jury was composed of six men and six women, all of whom were white. The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and denied the appeal.
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In the U.S. Supreme Court, the government conceded the invalidity of two of the grounds for denial of petitioner's claim given in its letter to the appeal board, but argued that there was factual support for the third ground.
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In what some considered a surprise decision, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Ali’s conviction.
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Justice Potter Stewart suggested that the Court simply set Ali free, citing a technical error by the Justice Department. Eventually, all justices, including Chief Justice Burger, agreed to overturn the conviction.
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Then challenged George Foreman, the reigning heavy weight champion, in a match that would come to be called the “Rumble in the Jungle” because it was held in Zaire, now the Congo.